HAVE you ever noticed the going out of a woman?
When a man goes out, he says—“I’m going out, shan’t be long.”
“Oh, George,” cries his wife from the other end of the house, “don’t go
for a moment. I want you to—” She hears a falling of hats, followed by
the slamming of the front door.
“Oh, George, you’re not gone!” she wails. It is but the voice of
despair. As a matter of fact, she knows he is gone. She reaches the
hall, breathless.
“He might have waited a minute,” she mutters to herself, as she picks up
the hats, “there were so many things I wanted him to do.”
She does not open the door and attempt to stop him, she knows he is
already half-way down the street. It is a mean, paltry way of going out,
she thinks; so like a man.
When a woman, on the other hand, goes out, people know about it. She
does not sneak out. She says she is going out. She says it, generally,
on the afternoon of the day before; and she repeats it, at intervals,
until tea-time. At tea, she suddenly decides that she won’t, that she
will leave it till the day after to-morrow instead. An hour later she
thinks she will go to-morrow, after all, and makes arrangements to wash
her hair overnight. For the next hour or so she alternates between fits
of exaltation, during which she looks forward to going out, and moments
of despondency, when a sense of foreboding falls upon her. At dinner she
persuades some other woman to go with her; the other woman, once
persuaded, is enthusiastic about going, until she recollects that she
cannot. The first woman, however, convinces her that she can.
“Yes,” replies the second woman, “but then, how about you, dear? You are
forgetting the Joneses.”
“So I was,” answers the first woman, completely non-plussed. “How very
awkward, and I can’t go on Wednesday. I shall have to leave it till
Thursday, now.”
“But _I_ can’t go Thursday,” says the second woman.
“Well, you go without me, dear,” says the first woman, in the tone of one
who is sacrificing a life’s ambition.
“Oh no, dear, I should not think of it,” nobly exclaims the second woman.
“We will wait and go together, Friday!”
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” says the first woman. “We will start
early” (this is an inspiration), “and be back before the Joneses arrive.”
They agree to sleep together; there is a lurking suspicion in both their
minds that this may be their last sleep on earth. They retire early with
a can of hot water. At intervals, during the night, one overhears them
splashing water, and talking.
They come down very late for breakfast, and both very cross. Each seems
to have argued herself into the belief that she has been lured into this
piece of nonsense, against her better judgment, by the persistent folly
of the other one. During the meal each one asks the other, every five
minutes, if she is quite ready. Each one, it appears, has only her hat
to put on. They talk about the weather, and wonder what it is going to
do. They wish it would make up its mind, one way or the other. They are
very bitter on weather that cannot make up its mind. After breakfast it
still looks cloudy, and they decide to abandon the scheme altogether.
The first woman then remembers that it is absolutely necessary for her,
at all events, to go.
“But there is no need for you to come, dear,” she says.
Up to that point the second woman was evidently not sure whether she
wished to go or whether she didn’t. Now she knows.
“Oh yes, I’ll come,” she says, “then it will be over!”
“I am sure you don’t want to go,” urges the first woman, “and I shall be
quicker by myself. I am ready to start now.”
The second woman bridles.
“_I_ shan’t be a couple of minutes,” she retorts. “You know, dear, it’s
generally _I_ who have to wait for _you_.”
“But you’ve not got your boots on,” the first woman reminds her.
“Well, they won’t take _any_ time,” is the answer. “But of course, dear,
if you’d really rather I did not come, say so.” By this time she is on
the verge of tears.
“Of course, I would like you to come, dear,” explains the first in a
resigned tone. “I thought perhaps you were only coming to please me.”
“Oh no, I’d _like_ to come,” says the second woman.
“Well, we must hurry up,” says the first; “I shan’t be more than a minute
myself, I’ve merely got to change my skirt.”
Half-an-hour later you hear them calling to each other, from different
parts of the house, to know if the other one is ready. It appears they
have both been ready for quite a long while, waiting only for the other
one.
“I’m afraid,” calls out the one whose turn it is to be down-stairs, “it’s
going to rain.”
“Oh, don’t say that,” calls back the other one.
“Well, it looks very like it.”
“What a nuisance,” answers the up-stairs woman; “shall we put it off?”
“Well, what do _you_ think, dear?” replies the down-stairs.
They decide they will go, only now they will have to change their boots,
and put on different hats.
For the next ten minutes they are still shouting and running about. Then
it seems as if they really were ready, nothing remaining but for them to
say “Good-bye,” and go.
They begin by kissing the children. A woman never leaves her house
without secret misgivings that she will never return to it alive. One
child cannot be found. When it is found it wishes it hadn’t been. It
has to be washed, preparatory to being kissed. After that, the dog has
to be found and kissed, and final instructions given to the cook.
Then they open the front door.
“Oh, George,” calls out the first woman, turning round again. “Are you
there?”
“Hullo,” answers a voice from the distance. “Do you want me?”
“No, dear, only to say good-bye. I’m going.”
“Oh, good-bye.”
“Good-bye, dear. Do you think it’s going to rain?”
“Oh no, I should not say so.”
“George.”
“Yes.”
“Have you got any money?”
Five minutes later they come running back; the one has forgotten her
parasol, the other her purse.
And speaking of purses, reminds one of another essential difference
between the male and female human animal. A man carries his money in his
pocket. When he wants to use it, he takes it out and lays it down. This
is a crude way of doing things, a woman displays more subtlety. Say she
is standing in the street, and wants fourpence to pay for a bunch of
violets she has purchased from a flower-girl. She has two parcels in one
hand, and a parasol in the other. With the remaining two fingers of the
left hand she secures the violets. The question then arises, how to pay
the girl? She flutters for a few minutes, evidently not quite
understanding why it is she cannot do it. The reason then occurs to her:
she has only two hands and both these are occupied. First she thinks she
will put the parcels and the flowers into her right hand, then she thinks
she will put the parasol into her left. Then she looks round for a table
or even a chair, but there is not such a thing in the whole street. Her
difficulty is solved by her dropping the parcels and the flowers. The
girl picks them up for her and holds them. This enables her to feel for
her pocket with her right hand, while waving her open parasol about with
her left. She knocks an old gentleman’s hat off into the gutter, and
nearly blinds the flower-girl before it occurs to her to close it. This
done, she leans it up against the flower-girl’s basket, and sets to work
in earnest with both hands. She seizes herself firmly by the back, and
turns the upper part of her body round till her hair is in front and her
eyes behind. Still holding herself firmly with her left hand—did she let
herself go, goodness knows where she would spin to;—with her right she
prospects herself. The purse is there, she can feel it, the problem is
how to get at it. The quickest way would, of course, be to take off the
skirt, sit down on the kerb, turn it inside out, and work from the bottom
of the pocket upwards. But this simple idea never seems to occur to her.
There are some thirty folds at the back of the dress, between two of
these folds commences the secret passage. At last, purely by chance, she
suddenly discovers it, nearly upsetting herself in the process, and the
purse is brought up to the surface. The difficulty of opening it still
remains. She knows it opens with a spring, but the secret of that spring
she has never mastered, and she never will. Her plan is to worry it
generally until it does open. Five minutes will always do it, provided
she is not flustered.
At last it does open. It would be incorrect to say that she opens it.
It opens because it is sick of being mauled about; and, as likely as not,
it opens at the moment when she is holding it upside down. If you happen
to be near enough to look over her shoulder, you will notice that the
gold and silver lies loose within it. In an inner sanctuary, carefully
secured with a second secret spring, she keeps her coppers, together with
a postage-stamp and a draper’s receipt, nine months old, for elevenpence
three-farthings.
I remember the indignation of an old Bus-conductor, once. Inside we were
nine women and two men. I sat next the door, and his remarks therefore
he addressed to me. It was certainly taking him some time to collect the
fares, but I think he would have got on better had he been less bustling;
he worried them, and made them nervous.
“Look at that,” he said, drawing my attention to a poor lady opposite,
who was diving in the customary manner for her purse, “they sit on their
money, women do. Blest if you wouldn’t think they was trying to ’atch
it.”
At length the lady drew from underneath herself an exceedingly fat purse.
“Fancy riding in a bumpby bus, perched up on that thing,” he continued.
“Think what a stamina they must have.” He grew confidential. “I’ve seen
one woman,” he said, “pull out from underneath ’er a street doorkey, a
tin box of lozengers, a pencil-case, a whopping big purse, a packet of
hair-pins, and a smelling-bottle. Why, you or me would be wretched,
sitting on a plain door-knob, and them women goes about like that all
day. I suppose they gets used to it. Drop ’em on an eider-down pillow,
and they’d scream. The time it takes me to get tuppence out of them,
why, it’s ’eart-breaking. First they tries one side, then they tries the
other. Then they gets up and shakes theirselves till the bus jerks them
back again, and there they are, a more ’opeless ’eap than ever. If I ’ad
my way I’d make every bus carry a female searcher as could over’aul ’em
one at a time, and take the money from ’em. Talk about the poor
pickpocket. What I say is, that a man as finds his way into a woman’s
pocket—well, he deserves what he gets.”
But it was the thought of more serious matters that lured me into
reflections concerning the over-carefulness of women. It is a theory of
mine—wrong possibly; indeed I have so been informed—that we pick our way
through life with too much care. We are for ever looking down upon the
ground. Maybe, we do avoid a stumble or two over a stone or a brier, but
also we miss the blue of the sky, the glory of the hills. These books
that good men write, telling us that what they call “success” in life
depends on our flinging aside our youth and wasting our manhood in order
that we may have the means when we are eighty of spending a rollicking
old age, annoy me. We save all our lives to invest in a South Sea
Bubble; and in skimping and scheming, we have grown mean, and narrow, and
hard. We will put off the gathering of the roses till to-morrow, to-day
it shall be all work, all bargain-driving, all plotting. Lo, when
to-morrow comes, the roses are blown; nor do we care for roses, idle
things of small marketable value; cabbages are more to our fancy by the
time to-morrow comes.
Life is a thing to be lived, not spent, to be faced, not ordered. Life
is not a game of chess, the victory to the most knowing; it is a game of
cards, one’s hand by skill to be made the best of. Is it the wisest who
is always the most successful? I think not. The luckiest whist-player I
ever came across was a man who was never _quite_ certain what were
trumps, and whose most frequent observation during the game was “I really
beg your pardon,” addressed to his partner; a remark which generally
elicited the reply, “Oh, don’t apologize. All’s well that ends well.”
The man I knew who made the most rapid fortune was a builder in the
outskirts of Birmingham, who could not write his name, and who, for
thirty years of his life, never went to bed sober. I do not say that
forgetfulness of trumps should be cultivated by whist-players. I think
my builder friend might have been even more successful had he learned to
write his name, and had he occasionally—not overdoing it—enjoyed a sober
evening. All I wish to impress is, that virtue is not the road to
success—of the kind we are dealing with. We must find other reasons for
being virtuous; maybe, there are some. The truth is, life is a gamble
pure and simple, and the rules we lay down for success are akin to the
infallible systems with which a certain class of idiot goes armed each
season to Monte Carlo. We can play the game with coolness and judgment,
decide when to plunge and when to stake small; but to think that wisdom
will decide it, is to imagine that we have discovered the law of chance.
Let us play the game of life as sportsmen, pocketing our winnings with a
smile, leaving our losings with a shrug. Perhaps that is why we have
been summoned to the board and the cards dealt round: that we may learn
some of the virtues of the good gambler; his self-control, his courage
under misfortune, his modesty under the strain of success, his firmness,
his alertness, his general indifference to fate. Good lessons these, all
of them. If by the game we learn some of them our time on the green
earth has not been wasted. If we rise from the table having learned only
fretfulness and self-pity I fear it has been.
The grim Hall Porter taps at the door: “Number Five hundred billion and
twenty-eight, your boatman is waiting, sir.”
So! is it time already? We pick up our counters. Of what use are they?
In the country the other side of the river they are no tender. The
blood-red for gold, and the pale-green for love, to whom shall we fling
them? Here is some poor beggar longing to play, let us give them to him
as we pass out. Poor devil! the game will amuse him—for a while.
Keep your powder dry, and trust in Providence, is the motto of the wise.
Wet powder could never be of any possible use to you. Dry, it may be,
_with_ the help of Providence. We will call it Providence, it is a
prettier name than Chance—perhaps also a truer.
Another mistake we make when we reason out our lives is this: we reason
as though we were planning for reasonable creatures. It is a big
mistake. Well-meaning ladies and gentlemen make it when they picture
their ideal worlds. When marriage is reformed, and the social problem
solved, when poverty and war have been abolished by acclamation, and sin
and sorrow rescinded by an overwhelming parliamentary majority! Ah, then
the world will be worthy of our living in it. You need not wait, ladies
and gentlemen, so long as you think for that time. No social revolution
is needed, no slow education of the people is necessary. It would all
come about to-morrow, _if only we were reasonable creatures_.
Imagine a world of reasonable beings! The Ten Commandments would be
unnecessary: no reasoning being sins, no reasoning creature makes
mistakes. There would be no rich men, for what reasonable man cares for
luxury and ostentation? There would be no poor: that I should eat enough
for two while my brother in the next street, as good a man as I, starves,
is not reasonable. There would be no difference of opinion on any two
points: there is only one reason. You, dear Reader, would find, that on
all subjects you were of the same opinion as I. No novels would be
written, no plays performed; the lives of reasonable creatures do not
afford drama. No mad loves, no mad laughter, no scalding tears, no
fierce unreasoning, brief-lived joys, no sorrows, no wild dreams—only
reason, reason everywhere.
But for the present we remain unreasonable. If I eat this mayonnaise,
drink this champagne, I shall suffer in my liver. Then, why do I eat it?
Julia is a charming girl, amiable, wise, and witty; also she has a share
in a brewery. Then, why does John marry Ann? who is short-tempered, to
say the least of it, who, he feels, will not make him so good a
house-wife, who has extravagant notions, who has no little fortune.
There is something about Ann’s chin that fascinates him—he could not
explain to you what. On the whole, Julia is the better-looking of the
two. But the more he thinks of Julia, the more he is drawn towards Ann.
So Tom marries Julia and the brewery fails, and Julia, on a holiday,
contracts rheumatic fever, and is a helpless invalid for life; while Ann
comes in for ten thousand pounds left to her by an Australian uncle no
one had ever heard of.
I have been told of a young man, who chose his wife with excellent care.
Said he to himself, very wisely, “In the selection of a wife a man cannot
be too circumspect.” He convinced himself that the girl was everything a
helpmate should be. She had every virtue that could be expected in a
woman, no faults, but such as are inseparable from a woman. Speaking
practically, she was perfection. He married her, and found she was all
he had thought her. Only one thing could he urge against her—that he did
not like her. And that, of course, was not her fault.
How easy life would be did we know ourselves. Could we always be sure
that to-morrow we should think as we do to-day. We fall in love during a
summer holiday; she is fresh, delightful, altogether charming; the blood
rushes to our head every time we think of her. Our ideal career is one
of perpetual service at her feet. It seems impossible that Fate could
bestow upon us any greater happiness than the privilege of cleaning her
boots, and kissing the hem of her garment—if the hem be a little muddy
that will please us the more. We tell her our ambition, and at that
moment every word we utter is sincere. But the summer holiday passes,
and with it the holiday mood, and winter finds us wondering how we are
going to get out of the difficulty into which we have landed ourselves.
Or worse still, perhaps, the mood lasts longer than is usual. We become
formally engaged. We marry—I wonder how many marriages are the result of
a passion that is burnt out before the altar-rails are reached?—and three
months afterwards the little lass is broken-hearted to find that we
consider the lacing of her boots a bore. Her feet seem to have grown
bigger. There is no excuse for us, save that we are silly children,
never sure of what we are crying for, hurting one another in our play,
crying very loudly when hurt ourselves.
I knew an American lady once who used to bore me with long accounts of
the brutalities exercised upon her by her husband. She had instituted
divorce proceedings against him. The trial came on, and she was highly
successful. We all congratulated her, and then for some months she
dropped out of my life. But there came a day when we again found
ourselves together. One of the problems of social life is to know what
to say to one another when we meet; every man and woman’s desire is to
appear sympathetic and clever, and this makes conversation difficult,
because, taking us all round, we are neither sympathetic nor clever—but
this by the way.
Of course, I began to talk to her about her former husband. I asked her
how he was getting on. She replied that she thought he was very
comfortable.
“Married again?” I suggested.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Serve him right,” I exclaimed, “and his wife too.” She was a pretty,
bright-eyed little woman, my American friend, and I wished to ingratiate
myself. “A woman who would marry such a man, knowing what she must have
known of him, is sure to make him wretched, and we may trust him to be a
curse to her.”
My friend seemed inclined to defend him.
“I think he is greatly improved,” she argued.
“Nonsense!” I returned, “a man never improves. Once a villain, always a
villain.”
“Oh, hush!” she pleaded, “you mustn’t call him that.”
“Why not?” I answered. “I have heard you call him a villain yourself.”
“It was wrong of me,” she said, flushing. “I’m afraid he was not the
only one to be blamed; we were both foolish in those days, but I think we
have both learned a lesson.”